Installation

Binary Installers

Anaconda

Packages for Anaconda can be installed via:

conda install -c paulscherrerinstitute cachannel

Wheel

The binary packages are distributed at PyPI. They have EPICS 3.14.12.6 libraries statically builtin. Make sure you have pip and wheel installed,

$ sudo pip install cachannel # macOS
> C:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe install cachannel :: Windows

Egg

PyPI does not allow upload linux-specific wheels package, yet (as of 2014). The old egg format is used then:

$ sudo easy_install cachannel

Or install only for the current user:

$ easy_install --user cachannel

Source

If a binary package is not available for your system, you can build from source. If you have a valid EPICS base installation, as described by Getting EPICS, the C extension will be compiled. Otherwise it will instead use caffi as the backend.

The source can be downloaded in various ways:

  • The released source tarballs can be found at PyPI.

  • From the git repository, each release can be downloaded as a zip package.

  • Clone the repository if you feel adventurous:

    $ git clone https://github.com/CaChannel/CaChannel.git

On Linux, the python header files are normally provided by package like python-devel or python-dev.

numpy is optional, but it can boost the performace when reading large waveform PVs, which are common for areaDetector images.

Getting EPICS

In general please follow the official installation instruction. Here is a short guide,

  • Get the source tarball from http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/base/R3-14/12.php.

  • Unpack it to a proper path.

  • Set the following environment variables:

    • EPICS_BASE : the path containing the EPICS base source tree.

    • EPICS_HOST_ARCH : EPICS is built into static libraries on Windows.

      OS Arch EPICS_HOST_ARCH
      Linux 32bit linux-x86
      64bit linux-x86_64
      Windows 32bit win32-x86
      64bit windows-x64
      macOS PPC darwin-ppcx86
      Intel darwin-x86

  • Run make.

Build

As soon as the epics base libraries are ready, it is simple,

  • On Widnows:

    > C:\Python27\python.exe setup.py install

  • On Linux/macOS:

    $ [sudo] python setup.py install

Note

You might need to pass -E flag to sudo to preserve the EPICS environment variables. If your user account is not allowed to do so, a normal procedure should be followed,

$ su -
# export EPICS_BASE=<epics base path>
# export EPICS_HOST_ARCH=<epics host arch>
# python setup.py install

Package

After the build succeeds, you may want to create a package for distribution.

Anaconda

Conda recipe is included:

$ conda build -c paulscherrerinstitute conda-recipe

Wheel

$ python setup.py bdist_wheel

RPM

The spec file python-CaChannel.spec is included. Get the source tarball either from PyPI or create it by python setup.py sdist, and run:

$ rpmbuild -ta CaChannel-3.0.0.tar.gz

The binary and source RPM will be created. The package name is python-CaChannel.